Maybe a dumb question, the biggest reason I can’t fully move is i do enjoy VR and sim racing, both of which I’ve seen have limited linux support still, and though I enjoy figuring things out and fixing stuff, I don’t want to always be tinkering instead of just racing/gaming.
Would it be possible or safe to keep gaming on win 10 until it’s totally not supported, but not using it for any shopping etc where sensitive info is being transferred ?
I did just order a 2 tb drive to put linux mint on, to give gaming on linux another try. I haven’t had a linux install for a few years now and kind of miss it. But i do wonder if I’ll need to reinstall all my games again or can just access them off the existing hard drives (I know, NTFS formatted wont be optimum for linux).
If I’m in the wrong spot to ask, please inform.
You can dual boot both Windows and Linux, and the reboot to Windows when you want to play games, and reboot to Linux for other stuff.
A bit of work, and extra space needed, but you can easily do that.
If you have the hardware for it you can run windows in a VM with GPU passthrough to a 2nd GPU
Having done this myself, multiple times (I write a lot of graphics code and like being able to test stuff on AMD, Nvidia and Intel GPUs on multiple operating systems without having to switch physical machines), it’s a huge hassle and frankly if you just need a Windows machine to play games on occasionally a dual boot setup is way more convenient, not to mention less buggy.
I get really tired of rebooting just for a single round. A full 2nd machine would be more convenient but that means another CPU, RAM, MB, PSU, SSD, case, wires and more desk space. Try at your own risk, warning there be dragons. I’m a Gentoo user with older AMD cards your milage may vary
Yes. Dual boot, or even simpler, try running your games in Windows VM in Linux. Performance hit should be minimal.
What VM solution are you using? When I tried to do this on Unraid, I kept running into opengl issues. Being honest i was trying to run a slicer that only had a windows profile.
At the moment, just VirtualBox for simplicity, but have run flat KVM for similar things in the past. It is FAR from ideal, but better than fucking with dual booting for myself. Also breaks a lot with Nvidia hardware.
Take a look at qemu + virt-manager (gui) and maybe if 2 gpu’s plugged into same monitor check github for looking-glass
Performance hit should be minimal
Only if you have a second GPU that you can pass through to the VM. Otherwise you’re gonna have a bad time.
Dual boot is the simpler method. A VM is far from simple when it comes to gaming.
You can use one GPU and hot swap it to pass through when booting your windows VM
I would be surprised if they’d run well in a VM but I’ll have to try! I have an AMD fx 8 core and a rtx 580 so I think compatibility wise I’ll be good.
Other games I play a lot are cs2 and board game sim, some pubg and gtav (which i know I’d need to use windows for)
Yeah gtav might struggle in Linux. ProtonDB shows its a tough config. Dual boot is probably your only option if that’s a deal breaker. Sharing my experience, I had a game i was playing that required windows and I was dual booting for a while, as well as a 3d slicer that the only profile for a printer I own is still windows. Everytime windows updated it seemed to have a good chance of wrecking the bootloader. After about the third time that happened I just stopped doing that, wiped windows and ran fedora.
As of today, I have spent time trying to make that slicer profile work in Linux, got it most of the way there and got frustrated, so instead I repurposed an old laptop that gets powered on only for that one specific printer.
Every game I play now runs on Linux.
Having had similar hardware and reading about your preferences let me throw some cents in the hat:
Sim stuff runs mostly ootb. I don’t have a fancy rig, but both my G29 and x52 pro work perfectly fine. At most, some games will map the axis wrong, but that’s easily fixable (eg. AMS2 swaps clutch and brakes and inverts all axis). The insullary apps such as TrackIR and controller stuff is already available, although not official. There’s Oversteer for wheels and GX52 for hotas.
I don’t have a TrackIR device but I’ve used FacetrackNoIR with the neuralnet face tracker and besides needing a bit of background lighting, it woked fine.
It’s not all perfect and depending on the games, it might need some tinkering. For example Mechwarrior 5 refuses to work properly with my hotas, and when I had a weaker CPU, Beam.ng was unusable with traffic/opponents. Some older titles are a pain to set up, like the older WRC games that had some obscure config files for the mappings. The upside is that you can back up your “fake windows C:” (aka as compatdata folder) once you got everything the way you like it.
I mostly do office type stuff and vector graphics along with CNC, and the proprietary software I need runs 90% fine on wine/bottles, so I haven’t had much of any blocker issues with work stuff.
I’ve been running Linux way before proton was a thing, and I’m really happy about how things are moving nowadays. I got used to the gnome workflow and now any other OS feels cumbersome and clunky, but YMMV.
TL; DR:
- PRO: most sim stuff just works
- CON: some games perform a bit worse
- PRO: most hardware runs OOTB and popular gear have apps for setup and options
- CON: those are unofficial and might not support all bells and whistles
- CON: some games are finnicky to set up, especially with external software addons (eg crewchief, ED companion, TrackIR)
- PRO: you can save your games prefix so all that work is portable/reproducible
- most office stuff is more than adequate for everyday work.
It’s a bit advanced, but I have a GPU in my server that doubles as a home theater / couch gaming thing. I PCI passthrough the GPU to a windows VM where I get near baremetal performamce.
It runs ontop of proxmox and has a bunch of containers and VMs for my other stuff.
Currently, the linux part is headless, as in I don’t need a screen for the linux stuff on there, but it’d be a matter of hooking up the onboards graphics to another monitor input.
I like the idea because unlike dualboot, it all runs at the same time.
My other desktop’s mobo has issues with vfio and iommu groups so I can’t really do this on that other machine, but for my next build, good iommu groups will be a deciding factor.
I’d love to have a similar setup for my desktop and just switch monitor inputs or KB/mouse USB switch between both.
I run all my games through the Steam Proton compatibility layer and don’t miss Windows for anything. I don’t play multiplayer games outside of Marvel Rivals though so your mileage may vary. Single player games perform flawlessly.
Try dual booting for that extra piece of mins but if you’re anything like me and only do text editing, gaming, and web browsing on your machine, you might not need to stick to Windows at all.
You would need to reinstall your games on Linux, to answer your question. Steam and Heroic Games Launcher make this process quite painless, but yeah, still gotta do it. NTFS supports ignoring upper/lowercase, whereas Linux (and other Unix-y systems) do not, at least by default. This can cause all kinds of weird issues down the line.
Now that said, one thing you could do is make a new steam library on Windows to a drive or partition formatted as ExFAT, then use Steam on Windows to transfer your games to that new library. If you did that, I think you could simply add that steam library to your instance of steam running on Linux Mint. Combined with setting steam to use Proton for any Windows game (it’s just one checkbox to do so), I think maybe you’d be in business.
Hosting the games on NTFS and loading them into Steam from there under Linux is possible. It is inconsistent and a hasssle, though.
I will say the setup the OP suggests is totally doable, but when I’ve had it that way it turned out to be easier to just do everything else on Windows than to flip back and forth, so after I updated some hardware I haven’t been on a hurry to set up Linux again.
I’d say it’s more convenient to do this long term if you have two PCs. Maybe a laptop for Linux work and a desktop with a powerful GPU for gaming. Being able to have both on sleep and quickly switching back and forth is less likely to make you (well, me, at least) lazy than having to reboot each time.
I mean, personally I do all of my gaming on Linux and fully removed Windows from my gaming desktop in 2022 and haven’t looked back. My VR headset is a Vive, so it works just fine with SteamVR on Linux, no additional issues there, even while using Proton.
I was just thinking exFAT would work more consistently for a steam library under Linux than NTFS and it would also not introduce any issues on Windows.
You’d think, but at least in my Manjaro install I had the exact same, if not a bit worse, of an experience trying to share an exFAT drive than a NTFS drive. I don’t recommend it either way.
I definitely play enough games without full Linux support that I wouldn’t have switched fully, even if I didn’t need Windows for work. The anticheat issues are one thing, but with a high end Nvidia card I found a bunch of proprietary features either didn’t work or underperformed compared to Windows. Mix that with a HDR, VRR display and it was a bit of a mess.
Linux was snappier for desktop office work most of the time, though.
